“The Specificities of Friendship”: Wesley Hill

…There’s a certain irony, of course, about pursuing friendship, since, as C. S. Lewis notes, “The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends.” Sadly, and this is borne out in my experience, the times when someone is most desperate for friendship may be the times when it is hardest to find.

And that’s why I’m interested in what’s implicit in Karen’s comment—that most of us are already involved in certain friendships that we can work to strengthen, rather than create from ground zero. The question then becomes not, “How do we find the perfect friend whose qualities we’ve already enumerated ahead of time?” but rather, “How do we do undergird and deepen the ones in which we’re already involved?”